Steve Anderson

The Visible Evidence documentary conference continues through the weekend with several notable events in addition to an impressive, three-track array of panels and presentations devoted to all things documentary. Perhaps of greatest potential interest to the IMD community is the presentation by filmmaker James Benning on Saturday night from 8:00 to 10:00PM in SCA 108. Billed as a "Multimedia Presentation" by Benning, who is best known for his uniquely rigorous body of landscape-focused structural films, the artist will be talking about his most recent non-film project "Milwaukee to Lincoln, MT," which involved reconstructing the cabin built by Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond and the cabin occupied by Theodore Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber) in the woods of Montana.

Known for his eclectic interests and fascination with notorious figures from American history (one of Benning's early films mined the personal diaries of Arthur Bremer, Nixon's would-be assassin who went on to shoot Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972), Benning is one of the few artists who could pull off such a perverse, yet striking, juxtaposition without trivializing the subject through postmodern irony-mongering. Whatever happens when Benning goes on stage in SCA 108 tomorrow night, I promise you will not want to miss it.

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The New Media://Visible Evidence exhibition showcases several examples of mainly Los Angeles-based documentary practice that employ disparate new media forms. The exhibition will include examples from the Web-based portraits of LA and its inhabitants produced by Juan Devis for the KCET series titled Web Stories; media artist Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, composed entirely of clips from YouTube videos; and several interactive DVD-ROM documentaries created by USC’s Labyrinth Project under the leadership of Marsha Kinder. The show also includes Erik Loyer and Sharon Daniel's interactive documentary Blood Sugar; The Iraqi Doctors Project: Research and Remix, which envisions remix as a scholarly practice and was produced by Virginia Kuhn, DJ Johnson and students in IML 340; Mobile Voices, a project created by and for day laborers using the MMS feature on cell phones; as well as several examples of database documentaries made using the Korsakow System, including Matt Soar's Almost Architecture and Florian Thalhofer's Forgotten Flags.

In addition to showcasing the projects in the School of Cinematic Arts Gallery, the exhibition will also include three lunch-time presentations during the conference, with Bookchin appearing on Friday to talk about Mass Ornament, Marsha Kinder and Scott Mahoy on Saturday to talk about the Labyrinth Project, and Katie Mills on Sunday to talk about Web Stories. We invite you to experience some of the innovative work produced in Los Angeles – the gallery showcasing the projects is located on the first floor of the Lucas Building in the School of Cinematic Arts; the lunch-time talks will take place between 1:15 and 1:45 in the gallery.

The exhibition was curated by Holly Willis and is presented by USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy in conjunction with the Visible Evidence conference.

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The NEH-Vectors seminar "Broadening the Digital Humanities" just wrapped up at USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy last week. One of the highlights for me was Johanna Drucker's talk on the role of design in the digital humanities. Drucker has been an inspiration to me for many years via her work with SpecLab at the University of Virginia and their work with computational literature that goes far beyond conventional text encoding to imagine literary game spaces (e.g., the Ivanhoe project). This video presents Drucker's setup to a much longer talk about the potentials of creating an online research and publication space that would take advantage of all the affordances of networked scholarship.

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